Moneual MonCaso: Touchscreen Gadgetry and Solid Cooling in One?

The system was initially configured by plugging in all the case fans in stock
form, without doing any kind of speed control. As noted, the fans are thermally
controlled, so our hope was that the baseline noise level would be acceptable
without any extra modification. One of the two drive bay fans was damaged in
our sample; its bearings ticked noisily, so we decided to disable the fan during
testing. Unless all four drive bays are full, it's unlikely that both would
be necessary anyway. For the initial test, the full-size storage drive was left
unplugged to keep the hard drive out of the equation. The system drive, a notebook
drive suspended in one of the drive bays, was too quiet to affect the results.

The Moncaso was borderline quiet on boot. The fans spun just around the threshold
where motor whine becomes an issue, so the noise character was mostly the
whoosh of air turbulence, with a low-pitched hum in the background. It wasn't
an offensive noise, but the amount of airflow noise was pretty substantial.

Within a few minutes of booting, the thermal conditions inside the case had
boosted the system fan speed to the point where the motor hum began to dominate.
The measured noise difference was a small 3 [email protected], but the subjective difference
was substantial; the noise was now tonal instead of broadband, making it much
harder to ignore.

That's the bad. The good is that, once stabilized, the fan speed barely moved,
even under sustained CPU load. The amount of heat in the system nearly doubled,
but the 1 [email protected] increase in noise was barely measurable. Thermal control?
What thermal control? Needless to say, pushing the heat up a further 15W by
engaging the graphics card had no effect on noise whatsoever.

Thermally, the Moncaso was perfectly adequate. The temperatures we saw were
in line with the results we've seen in most other well-cooled systems. The
65°C load temperature was hot, but that's more of a reflection of our
choice of heatsink and fan than a strike against the case itself. We refer
you to our review of Zalman's
HD135 case for an example of what happens when case airflow isn't
sufficient.

Configuration #2

The thermal performance we saw in the first test convinced us there was some
headroom to turn the fan speed down, so that's what we did. Certainly, there
was some space for acoustic improvement! The two exhaust fans on the back
panel were undervolted to 7V, while the fan in the drive bay was dropped to
5V.

The results in the second test were nearly identical to the first test, confirming
our suspicion that the system fans were spinning far faster than necessary
in our configuration. The only substantial difference was the temperature
of the hard drive, which jumped nearly 10°C. It should be noted that this
drive  the system drive  was mounted in the bay with the damaged
fan so the rise in temperature probably had more to do with its distance from
the active fan than the speed of the fan itself.

Under load, it took more than an hour before we heard any change in noise.
The noise level eventually settled 2 [email protected] higher than idle, but it's unlikely
that typical usage would push the system hard enough to create such a large
change. In reality, the fan speed probably would have remained unchanged.

The acoustic improvement was substantial. The measured noise dropped by 8
[email protected], and the noise character smoothed out enough to fade into the background.
Although it is far from the quietest system we've seen, 25 [email protected] is acceptably
quiet. It won't be inaudible in a quiet living room, but it will easily be
drowned out by any sound effects or music.

Our last configuration threw the full-sized storage drive into the mix to
see how well the drive bays handled drive noise. Given the relatively high
noise level of the system, we did not expect to hear a major change, so we
were surprised to see measured noise jump up. Close listening confirmed that
there seemed to be slightly more noise, but the overall noise character did
not change.

Seek noise was considerably worse. Hard-mounted in the drive bay, the seeks
produced a rumble that was clearly audible above the background fan noise.
The peaks measured 30 [email protected], nudging just above our (admittedly arbitrary)
30 [email protected] threshold between noisy and quiet. There's no question that things
could be improved by some method of soft-mounting the drive.